James Gurney

This daily weblog by Dinotopia creator James Gurney is for illustrators, plein-air painters, sketchers, comic artists, animators, art students, and writers. You'll find practical studio tips, insights into the making of the Dinotopia books, and first-hand reports from art schools and museums.

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Saturday, February 23, 2013

Cristian Romero has created a free digital tool for analyzing color schemes. All you have to do is drag a "jpg," "png," or "bmp" into a box, and it will output a gamut map. The gamut map shows which colors are inside the color scheme and which are outside.

Here is a painting by Anders Zorn, showing the narrow range of colors used in the picture. The scheme is centered in yellows and oranges. The "extra-gamut" colors (colors that don't appear in the scheme) are magenta, blue, cyan, and green.

This image has a wider gamut, extending across neutral gray at the center of the circle. It has full intensity yellows and reds as well as some cyan, green, and violet. The gamut doesn't reach all the way to the outer edges of the circle because some hues are only partially saturated.

Here's a fine example of a complementary gamut, a narrow slice of the color wheel from orange to cyan-blue.

17 comments:

I did the free download because I could not get the sample to do anything. After I downloaded it, I found it was a windows application so it doesn't work on my Mac. :( Too bad, because it looks like a very cool application.

Blog reader wasn't able to leave a comment, but he explained: "I've got some news that you may want to share with your other visitors.I tested the gamut masking tool for Windows with Linux and WINE and it worked fine - openSUSE 12.2. ;-)"

I had to download on Windows XP,...Windows 7 and Malware wouldn't accept it. Also, it doesn't pull from Photoshop, so I then dragged from a file a copy of W. Homers' Gloucester Harbor and the gamut worked fine... Hope to use this more, and thanks for the info.John

Although I only have macs I learned a lot from this post. I tend to put a wide range of colors into my work. But when I don't I usually end up with a stronger painting. The images in the post, especially the photo of the desert scene, really drive the point home that we're not seeing as wide a range of colors as we think we see in a scene selected as being beautiful. From that I think I might be able to restrain myself when I look down at my palette and have only mixed a few colors. I realize I can keep going back to those limited blobs of color and get everything I need.

Thanks a lot James for this post and everybody for the feedback, I'll make a better version as soon as possible.

As Michael said it's impressive that a very limited palette can achieve amazing results. Since I read "Color and Light" I became interested on Velazquez, Sorolla and Zorn palettes, so I built KGamut to analyze some of their paintings.

I forgot to mention that you can save the generated gamut maps with right click over them, and you can associate the jpg, jpeg, png or bmp files to "open with" KGamut.exe if you need.